Mass Effect 3: The Live Actioning

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We seem to be doing this backwards. On Monday we kicked off E3 week with an action-packed in-engine trailer for Mass Effect 3 featuring such bravado-soaked one-liners as “We need a plan to stop them!” “WE FIGHT OR WE DIE. THAT’S THE PLAN.” Captain Shepherd that’s a terrible plan and you are a bad captain.

Anyway, today we’ve got a live action trailer showing various humans acting all shocked at the imminent invasion of Earth. You know, the same invasion that’ll form the backdrop of Mass Effect 3. You can watch it after the jump.

1:07 is totally the best bit. I wish I could remember what those guys were called.

At least that sound like French, it still use the vocabulary coming from google trad tough, but it’s not like MW3 (god I hope the russian/arabic in the games is not as bad as the French is in the trailer. They must be laughing / WTF-ing all the time).

The media never downplays events, there’s a reason why there isn’t a term inverse to ‘sensationalism’. At worst, the media exaggerates and assumes. They’d assume it’s time-travelling Mayans long before they’d collectively wave their hand in dismissal. That’s assuming the government(s) wouldn’t lie that it’s a military exercise, too, in order to avoid panic.

Because the trailer was dreadful? Why oh why are they wearing regular business suits for example? In which Mass Effect game do you see ANYONE wearing a suit? Budget issues be-damned! Hire some fresh out of college costume designer to come up with the craziest news caster garb they can.

I prefer to get my in-game tv news from the Brotherhood of NOD. At least with them there’s the chance of an on-screen execution to keep me focused on current affairs. Otherwise, it’s not so different to FOX.

I feel the same way unfortunately :/ When I played the first ME I had a absolute wonderful time (the inventory was a pain in the butt though and there were several things I never fully understood until towards the end). The second game, I liked the “production values” of it and the cover system was nice however I thought the combat was the weakest part of it (it felt just like any other run/gun/pickup ammo game) and was annoyed with the respawning enemies which magically stop once you get to a certain point.

This looks like the combat has been “streamlined” even further, and just has a all around “meh” feeling to it. While I will still have to wait to really get a true impression of it, my excitement for the series has completly plumetted. :/

Also it seems really incongruous with the previous 2 episodes that anyone should care about earth being invaded. There’s a whole galaxy and I can’t think of any missions that actually have taken place on Earth.

I love the Mass Effect series, but…this whole “LAST STAND ON EARTH” thing is seriously putting me off. I want to explore space and find new cool planets, I don’t want to be on earth. I’m on earth enough in my real life as it is.

It’s also monstrously egotistical. Earth isn’t even close to being strategically important on a galactic scale. For a superior race of ultra-logic, the reapers are pretty damn stupid. The Geth or Krogan or even the Tourisms Turians are surely far more significant than squishy, divided, backwards-arse humans.

I’d like to make a few things clear: You all have to take a look at the ME galaxy map. The reapers approach from the bottom area of the map. First, the batarian systems were under attack, hence all the mutated batarians in the trailers. The next known system is the Sol system with Earth. For me it makes perfect sense. After Earth is attacked Shepard escapes with the Normandy. He’ll be visiting plenty of worlds, don’t worry.

It’s pretty much established by now that they’re far more interested in humans than any of the other species, what with humanity actually managing to defeat a reaper, and all that noise about interesting genetic diversity. Assuming they regard humanity as some kind of challenge relative to the other insignificant races, attacking Earth isn’t all that implausible. Virtually the entire Alliance navy is wiped out at once, after all.

Either way, they’re immortal death robots. I doubt they care much for tactical complexity after ploughing through the galaxy unopposed dozens of times already.

Right with you, Rinox. I hate being dragged back out of my pan-galactic travel fantasy to this crappy little world – it’s dull dull dull dull dull. Only hack writers still consider Earth as having some kind of deep emotional commitment for gamers – but if you’re giving us people in suits and ties, Bioware, after two games of funky sci-fi future outfits, you desperately need to hire some hacks and get rid of the poop-flinging monkeys who made that trailer.

This is my big disappointment with the whole series. They go to the trouble of modeling that great combat starship you fly around in, the most advanced in the galaxy, yada yada…. and then you never get to use it for anything except taxi service. Even ignoring all the lost potential for ship-to-ship action that you never see except in cutscenes, it’s a little silly that you’re always running around outdoors, popping off shots behind cover at some distant group of goons, when you could just call in an airstrike.

In fact, my PLAN was to stop Saren before he found the Mu Relay. But those council bastards wouldn’t believe me until he’d already gotten too much of a head-start. Took half the Alliance fleet to save their behinds from that one.

In fact, my PLAN after that fiasco was to just quietly die but some jerks named after a mythical dog brought me back from the dead and I found myself inexplicably cooperating with them despite every desire to not do so. Oh, and I might have gotten out of it if the council had believed me _that time_ about the impending threat, but nooooo.

In fact, my PLAN involved delaying the arrival of these alien monstrosities until we could form some kind of sensible response strategy. To do this I blew up an entire bleeping _star system_ and all I got for it was this lousy court martial!

Don’t talk to me about bad plans, anemia-boy, I’ve already tried all the good ones. The only one left is the only one that’s worked worth anything in this entire script: shooting people in the face.”

“Can we like, start a petition or something to have this as an actual in-game dialogue choice?”

“Starting an internet petition” is one of the very few activities in this world less likely to produce results than “ask the Council for help in Mass Effect”.

(btw, the dialgoue-wheel bit was not actually a criticism of ME or of Quinns, both of which are awesome, just a fun little thought experiment where Shepherd’s tired of taking flak for what the writers did and decides to go metagade)

I really hope there’s a scene in ME3 where Liara or someone asks Shepard:
“Cerberus? But they’re terrorists? Why didn’t you just refuse to work for them?”
*Shepard turns and stares directly at camera*
“I don’t know.”

That wasn’t too bad, but as is often the case fabbo CG moves aside to reveal not quite as nicely done live action work (The Prey 3 one did it better by removing the live action almost entirely).
Really, anyone wanting to fake a newscast should just hire The Onion. Seriously, they have it nailed to such perfection it scares me.

I’m pretty fond of late-Bioware games, DA2 aside. And they sell well, so the marketing is obviously totally fine and working for them.
And yet, I find myself repeatedly in the same cycle of seeing pre-release trailers and thinking, ‘oh dear, that looks a bit shit, not looking forward to that any more’ before reading glowing reviews, buying, playing and enjoying.

This weird video was shit to my mind. Really a bit embarrassing. I no longer want this game that I’ll almost certainly end up buying.

Clearly, this is partly my fault for paying any attention whatsoever to pre-release hype, but still, why does marketing that clearly works for big chunks of people who buy games leave me so very, very cold.

I’ve just come back from the worst day at work and this gave me a good belly laugh. I just want to say “Thank you very much!” – your words are hugely appreciated and have made a huge difference to my day.

I’m ok with seeing more shakycam home footage of Reapers laying down the smackitude. Not so much news presenters wearing the same sort of thing they do nowadays.

Also, this is tempting me to yet again finely hone my Shep’s story so I get all the glorious resolutions I’m after. Of course, I’ll no doubt yet again have to galavant around the bloody galaxy doing odd jobs in order to convince everyone, but that’s Mass Effect, innit? Although if there was a conversation option that just said “Look, I’ve saved the galaxy twice, can you just take my word for it?” I suppose it would be a pretty short game.

The more I read about Mass Effect 3, the more I feel that space exploration won’t be part of the game anymore. Just swapping from country to another, saving the Earth and discovering that the true power against the Reapers was lying underneath our feet.

I kinda figured ME3 would be all about rallying the other species to lend military aid, which is why you’ve been traipsing about the galaxy with a token member of each species for the last two games and developing attachments with them.

“Hey, Wrex, now that you’ve solved the whole clan warfare thing at home, would you mind sending a couple battalions my way? Thanks.”

“Hey, Liara, since you’re now the most powerful kingmaker in the galaxy, could you please prod the council to get off its fat ass?”

Yeah, it’ll probably follow that whole Seven Samurai plot arc about assembling the team again, and doing all their necessary side quests to get them to cooperate.

But I’m wondering how that works if the Reapers have already landed on Earth? Will it be another game where Shep gets to exist in a separate timeframe where he can ignore the current emergency, and do a bunch of trivial XP-building mini quests? I guess it could work if the Reaper attack doesn’t happen until near the end of the game, but that seems a bit spoilerish to show in a trailer.

Yes. This. I’m sure they must have found some use for those EALA ‘talent’ after the studio was dissolved. But really, this is cringe-worthy stuff. Whoever thought that C&C3 (plus three or four more games) ‘camp’ was appealing anyway? Red Alert 1 had a dark tone to it, so did the original C&C. Tiberian Sun too, had live action cutscenes that were cinematic and attempting to be serious. This shit isn’t even trying. TIES. WHY ARE THEY WEARING TIES AND SUITS.

The game comes out 9th of March 2012 in the UK and the 6th of Match 2012 in the US so I guess it must have been a UK date. Compare to this trailer link to gametrailers.com which comes up ‘3 – 6 – 2012’.